The Sceptical Investor

Description

Everyone wants to be a contrarian investor.
From the hedge funds who bet against the US housing market in the run up to 2008, to George Soros’s billion-dollar bet against the Bank of England in 1992, some of the most famous and most profitable trades in history have been contrarian calls.
And with the relentless growth of passive investing – investors blindly following the market – the opportunities for a smart investor to profit by betting against the crowd should be greater than ever.
Yet being a contrarian is hard work.
It takes patience, the conviction to stand by an unpopular viewpoint, and the mental toughness to endure being ‘wrong’ for prolonged periods of time. Standing out from the crowd goes against our every natural instinct.
Which is, of course, why it works.
So how do you go about it? There is no single, mechanical investment approach that marks an investor out as a contrarian. Instead, you need to adopt a sceptical mindset: a flexible mode of thinking that allows you to stand back and spot when the market’s view of the world is badly out of touch with reality – and the best way to profit when reality eventually reasserts itself.
In The Sceptical Investor, John Stepek, executive editor of MoneyWeek, pulls together the latest research on behavioural finance, and examples from well-known contrarian investors, to offer practical techniques to help you to spot opportunities in common investment situations, from turnaround plays to bubbles and busts, that others in the market miss.
It won’t make you popular and it won’t make you famous. But it will make you money.

John Stepek has been writing about business, economics and investment for more than 20 years.
He is the executive editor of MoneyWeek, Britain’s bestselling weekly investment magazine. Since 2005, he has been the main author on its investment newsletter, Money Morning, which goes out by email to more than 85,000 readers each day. MoneyWeek is well-known for its contrarian investment views – most notably for warning repeatedly, well before the fall of Northern Rock or Lehman Brothers, that the collapse in US house prices in 2006 would mutate into a much more damaging financial crisis.
Before he became a journalist, Stepek worked for his family’s business, a chain of electrical retail shops in the east end of Glasgow, but then decided that he would rather write for a living. He started out by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms and now writes about all aspects of financial markets, from bonds to gold to derivatives. He studied psychology at university and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.
His work has been published in The Spectator and The Sunday Times as well as a wide range of specialist financial magazines. He has appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. You can follow him on Twitter at @John_Stepek.

Packed with practical behavioural advice … I recommend it without reservation. —Tim Price, bestselling author of Investing Through the Looking GlassJohn has been writing about investing, and meeting with the key characters in the investment world, for over 15 years. You’ll want to read what he has to say very carefully – and make sure that anyone managing your money reads it too.—Merryn Somerset WebbJohn is one of Britain’s foremost financial writers and in this entertaining book he wants you to know why an understanding of human behaviour is an important part of any investment process. Knowing when to resist the siren voice of the crowd is one of the great challenges of investing. The book is packed with information about why the most comfortable investments are rarely the most profitable. —Alaisdair McKinnon; Chief Executive Officer, Chief Investment Officer, Manager The Scottish Investment Trust PLCHighly recommended. —Paul Summers, The Motley FoolI’ve read John Stepek’s work for over a decade now and have come to learn that when I see his byline, I know what follows will have been well considered and researched and thoughtfully communicated in an effort to genuinely help the reader become a better investor. The Sceptical Investor is case in point. If you’re new to investing, the book provides an excellent overview of how you should mentally and emotionally approach investing. It’s not just about running numbers on a spreadsheet or going against the grain. John smartly identifies the flaws in pure ‘contrarian’ investing and instead offers a more balanced and nuanced ‘sceptial’ mindset that will better serve investors over time. Learning that pure contrarianism doesn’t work can take a new investor years and many losses to figure out. John’s book will help you minimize your time on that troublesome path. If you’re an experienced investor, John’s book offers both fresh ideas around how to structure your process and serves as a reminder for the correct frameworks for approaching investing. Most investing books designed for individual investors are either too basic to be valuable to experienced investors or too advanced and scare off new investors. John has a knack for writing in a way that serves both groups. The Sceptical Investor is written in plan language, yet that does not come at the cost of insightful and useful commentary. This is the sign of a first rate investment thinker and John fits that mold indeed. —Todd Wenning, CFA and senior investment analyst at Ensemble Capital